Thursday, September 17, 2015

I
recently reread a favorite book from my youth, Wilkie Collins' The
Moonstone. Originally published in 1868, it is considered to be
an early classic of detective fiction. An unscrupulous British
officer stationed in India plucks the Moonstone, a massive diamond,
from the forehead of a Hindu idol and carries it back to England.
Misfortune, reputed to be the effects of a curse, dogs the man until
his death, whereupon the gem becomes a bequest to his niece upon her
eighteenth birthday. On the very night Rachel receives the stone,
however, it disappears from her bedroom. Broken engagements,
assaults, scandal, madness, illness, despair and death follow, as the
mystery becomes increasingly tangled.

The
first time I read The Moonstone, I was caught up in the story.
That was long before I began my career as a writer. During this more
recent reading, I found myself at least as conscious of Collins'
style and craft as I was of the plot.

The
novel unfolds in sections narrated by different individuals, each of
whom (according to the framing conceit of the tale) has been asked to
report on the events he or she personally witnessed relating to the
loss of the diamond. Some of the narrators are major actors in the
mystery, while others are peripheral. Collins does a magnificent job
giving each one a distinctive voice. The various sections not only
propel the plot, reveal clues and cleverly misdirect the reader's
attention, they also create surprisingly three dimensional images of
the characters – their motivations, prejudices and peculiarities.
My pleasure upon this second reading of the book came as much from
appreciating these unwitting self-portraits as from the gradual
unraveling of the secrets of the stone. And much of the richness of
these vignettes derives from the characters' differing use of
language.

The
experience started me thinking about the wonders of English grammar.
Victorian prose tends to be far more complex grammatically than what
you will find in modern novels. Sentences are longer, with multiple
clauses, adverbial modifiers, rhetorical questions and parenthetical
asides. Of course, some authors of the period produced sentences so
pedantic and labored that they're painful to read. A more skilled
writer (like Collins) uses these linguistic variations to express
nuanced relationships that would be difficult to communicate with
shorter, more direct sentences.

Consider
the following passage, chosen more or less at random. The narrator
(Franklin Blake) is a young gentleman, educated in Europe, and
hopelessly in love with Rachel.

I
might have answered that I remembered every word of it. But what
purpose, at that moment, would the answer have served?

How
could I tell her that what she had said had astonished me and
distressed me, had suggested to me that she was in a dangerous state
of nervous excitement, had even roused a moment's doubt in my mind
whether the loss of the jewel was as much a mystery to her as to the
rest of us – but had never once given me so much as a glimpse of
the truth? Without the shadow of a proof to produce in vindication of
my innocence, how could I persuade her that I knew no more than the
veriest stranger could have known of what was really in her thoughts
when she spoke to me on the terrace?

Complex
indeed! We have both simple past (“I remembered”, “I knew”)
and past perfect (“had said”, “had astonished”, “had
suggested”). Blake is describing a past conversation with Rachel,
in which they discussed another conversation that occurred the day
after the diamond disappeared (a time previous to the first
conversation). Even more intricate are the connections between facts
and the counter-factual or hypothetical, both in the simple past
(“might have”, “could I”) and more distant past (“could
have known”). The tense inflections and adverbial modifiers
elucidate relationships not only between different stretches of time
but also different degrees of reality.

How
many of us could pen a paragraph so complicated and yet so clear?

As
an exercise, I tried to translate the passage above into simpler,
more modern prose.

I
could have told her I remembered every word. But I doubt she would
have believed me.

I
could have said that she astonished and distressed me. She had been
in a dangerous state of nervous excitement. I had even wondered
whether she really knew more about the loss of the jewel than the
rest of us. But when we spoke, she hadn't given me the slightest hint
of the truth. Since I had no proof of my innocence, there was no way
I could convince her that during our conversation on the terrace her
accusations were as much a mystery to me as they would have been to a
stranger.

Even
this reworking requires the past and past perfect. There's no way to
get around them, since the distinction between the first and second
conversations is crucial to the sense of the paragraph. I didn't
manage to completely remove counter-factual expressions (“could
have”,”would have been”), either. If I had, significant chunks
of meaning would have been lost. As it is, I feel that the
translation doesn't begin to compare with the original in terms of
expressing subtleties of both logic and emotion.

Authors
today have a tendency to view grammar as a necessary evil, a set of
incomprehensible rules designed to trip them up as they proceed in
telling their story. I look at it differently. Grammatical structures
(and punctuation) exist in order express linguistic distinctions. As
writers, we're fortunate. English is capable of communicating a
bewildering variety of such distinctions, in wonderfully precise
ways.

By
comparison, I've been studying a foreign language where there's no
grammatical difference between present and past tense, or between
singular or plural, a language without articles or grammatical
mechanisms for indicating that something is contrary to fact. Native
speakers manage to understand one another, but I find the language
frustrating in its lack of specificity.

I'm
sorry to see the changes that are stripping English of some of its
grammatical richness. One rarely sees the subjunctive anymore, even
in written communication. Semi-colons are practically extinct.
Indeed, one of my publisher's house style prohibits them, along with
parenthetical asides.

Since
I began publishing, my own writing has followed the popular trends.
I've learned to limit subordinate clauses to no more than one or two
per sentence. I've been trained to avoid long passages in the past
perfect and to eschew adverbs. I won't say that my writing has
necessarily suffered; my early work definitely tends to be overly
prolix. Still, I sometimes feel like rebelling against the starkness
and simplicity of modern prose.

When
that happens, I sometimes write something pseudo-Victorian. Here, for
instance, is a passage from Incognito, ostensibly from a
Victorian woman's secret diary:

I
scarcely know how to begin this account of my adventures and my sins.
Indeed, I do not fully understand why I feel compelled to commit
these things to writing. Clearly, my purpose is not to review and
relive these experiences in the future, for in twenty minutes’ time
these sentences will be invisible even to me. Perhaps in the years
ahead, I will trail my fingers across the empty parchment, coloured
like flesh, and the memories will come alive without the words,
coaxed from the pages by my touch like flames bursting from cold
embers.

I
have a secret life, another self, and that secret has become a burden
that I clutch to myself, and yet would be relieved of. So, like the
Japanese who write their deepest desires on slips of rice paper and
then burn them, I write of secret joys and yearnings, and send that
writing into oblivion.

Let
me begin again. My name is Beatrice. The world sees me as poised,
prosperous, respectable, wife of one of Boston’s leading merchants
and industrialists, mother of two sweet children, lady of a fine
brick house on fashionable Mount Vernon Street, with Viennese crystal
chandeliers, Chinese porcelain, French velvet draperies, and Italian
marble fireplaces. I devote myself to the education of my dear Daniel
and Louisa, the management of my household, works of charity,
cultural afternoons. In sum, the many and sundry details of
maintaining oneself in proper society.

Though
I have borne two children, I am still considered beautiful. Indeed,
with my golden locks, fair skin, turquoise eyes and rosy lips, I am
often compared to an angel. How little they know, those who so
describe me. For in truth, I am depraved, wanton, and lecherous, so
lost that I do not even regret my fall.

Ah,
the glorious grammar!

Am
I the only one out there aroused by this structural intricacy, as
artful and constraining as shibari?

(By the way...I'm in the process of re-editing and expanding Incognito, for a release early next year!)